AT&T Natural Voices Review

Outdated voice quality, yet quite functional

Submitted by balance on Fri, 2010-06-04 16:14.
Author's Product Rating:
Ease of Use: 
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The lowest price: 29$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
Voices work, full integration with other applications and the OS.
Cons:
Low quality, robotic intonation at the end of most sentences.
Review:

The AT&T Natural Voices application gives you access to a powerful Text to Speech engine that allows you to convert any text to audio.

Besides the fact that it integrates into the Windows Environment, AT&T Natural Voices can also be accessed through any other external Text to Speech application.

The voice quality of the included speakers is of somewhat low quality. Although better than Microsoft's Text to Speech default voices, both the 8 khz and the 16 khz voices seem quite unclear at times and feature noticeable background noise.

The good thing about AT&T Natural Voices is that the voices have a pretty good and even intonation, without too many ups or downs being heard throughout the sentences. Sentence endings, however, sound robotic and sometimes the ending will not be noticeable.

Most words are pronounced correctly, with the occasional company name or geographic region being miss-pronounced.

To give readers perspective of the voice quality - it could be compared to an old vinyl recording or to an old telephone being used. Therefore, not much is to be expected from the application.

However, the fact that it fully integrates with the Windows OS is definitely an advantage and extends the application's usability.

Conclusion:

AT&T Natural Voices is an OK product but not the best. While it can certainly be viewed as an improvement over the Microsoft default voice, it won't break any records.